TRUCK OFF AND DIE

A second review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Once upon a time there was a 24-year-old named Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make movies. Not to grow up into one of the most marketable brand-name producers in the history of the medium; not to be personally responsible, along with his friend George, for murdering the concept of serious mass-market adult cinema; not to have his surname turned into an adjective meaning "glistening and manipulative awestruck innocence"; not to make artistic, difficult Motion Pictures like almost everybody else in his age group who went to film school. He wanted to make movies, and had spent much of his childhood and all of his adolescence dedicated to that goal. And he kind of got his chance when he sweet-talked his way into a job at Universal, where they let him direct episodes of TV shows, and fill up his CV with solid work that showed he could play nice with the hack jobs he was given, and eventually Universal decided he was so entirely good at doing this that they would let him direct feature-length made-for-TV movies. Which sounds worse than it was; the 1970s were an era where made-for-TV movies were, if not quite so prestigious as proper movies released in proper theaters, still treated with a level of respect by studios, critics, and audiences far beyond anything that even the most prestigious American television would regular enjoy until into the 2000s.

And that is how in 1971, Spielberg directed the Richard Matheson-scripted Duel, adapted from Matheson's own short story. The rest is history, we could say, noting that Duel was immensely well-received, enough to be given a theatrical release in Europe in a slightly extended version (the American TV cut ran just 73 minutes, the European cut is 90 minutes, and this longer version has entirely supplanted the original) - not unknown in made-for-TV films, though I'm not sure that it happened before 1971, and certainly wasn't obligatory. And while Spielberg had a few more telefilms to clean up his contract before Universal started handing him theatrical features, there was little to no chance that he wouldn't be given that opportunity following this film's success.

But glossing over things like that ignores that Duel is an excellent thriller in its own right, regardless of the career it directly facilitated. Spielberg could have drowned in a terrible shark robot-related accident on the set of Jaws, his second theatrical feature, and Duel would still be film enough to demonstrate his worth as a director, though it would also be unlikely in that case that we'd have such ready access to it as its director's inexhaustible popularity has ensured. But who's to say? Duel isn't just a very good TV movie, it is possibly the greatest of all TV movies - I haven't seen a better one, at least, and I've tried to track down most of the really well-regarded titles. And harping on its TV-ness is belittling it to a degree it doesn't deserve: this is a virtually perfect thriller as a movie qua movies. Spielberg would make films later in his career in which he invested more of himself, but this is among the most flawless pieces of entertainment he ever put his name to.

The scenario is as streamlined as they come: David Mann (Dennis Weaver), a middle-aged southern California business trip, has to make a trip for his job, the details of which are left entirely unexplained. Along the way, he finds himself stuck behind a slow-moving tanker truck, rusted all to hell and back, belching thick black smoke. As one will, he passes it; the driver of that truck almost immediately passes him back, and slows down even more. Thoroughly irritated, David passes it a second time and peels away, and this proves to be much more than the unseen truck driver can deal with, because he spends the rest of the movie stalking David, going from a distressing presence to an actual danger, trying to force David into an accident, and finally turning out to be a full-on horror movie psycho, his his very truck as the weapon to attempt to kill this suburban nobody.

It is, in its entirety, a chase; I can only think to compare it to The Terminator in terms of a film that's nothing but one steady flow of action with no meaningful ellipses. And even The Terminator pauses for a sex scene and a short nap. Duel doesn't take place in real time, but it has no narrative layovers; from the time David pisses off the truck driver until the time he finally succeeds in turning the tables on his unseen adversary, there's not a single point at which the film deviates from its single-minded conflict, although there are points in the early going at which David doesn't realise this is the case.

That's all on Matheson, of course, and it would be entirely possible for all that narrative minimalism and dementedly uninterrupted rising action to find itself caught by a film that didn't know how to capitalise on it. Duel is not that film. It is the work of a director whose facility with the medium genuinely seems innate - reminding myself of just how godalmighty young Spielberg was when he made this movie, it moves from impressive to outright freakish how well he knew exactly where to place the camera and how to stage action in front of it to maximise the tension that could be wrung from its basic scenario. And to be fair, much of what is especially great in Duel could be equally well dropped in the laps of cinematographer Jack A. Marta and editor Frank Morriss. But plenty of the specific things that show up here would be refined into even better shape in later Spielberg films: the editing specifically anticipates Jaws in certain points where the camera needs to move in close to Weaver's face in a hurry, as does a sound effect of a roaring jungle cat to subliminally trigger our savannah ape brains as the big hulking monster of the movie dies. The trick of using the truck driver's cowboy boots to signify his presence, trotted out just a couple of times, becomes a character-defining trick in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

But again, let us not reduce Duel. It is not interesting because it foreshadows the director's later megahits, but because it's so damn good on its own terms. Right from the start, in the extended cut, the film starts hitting us with absolutely perfect images, in this case a fender-mounted camera on the front of David's car, backing out of the garage (in fact, the solitary reason I've never tried to hunt out the TV cut is that I don't want to know what it's like without this opening image. Shabby of me, but there it is). It gives the impression of blackness receding from the camera, a grandiose opening gesture but one that perfectly starts the film off on a footing of unexpected perspective and continuous momentum, especially once the soundtrack kicks in and we hear a constantly changing radio while the road constantly rushes towards us at a freakishly close angle. It's a specific image that's never exactly re-created, though it is echoed, and it's the start to the film's cunning use of wide lenses to exaggerate the closeness of objects and the speed with which they approach the camera - best employed when the truck is tailgating at a deliriously close range, but always an effective way to suggest the California desert rushing by at breakneck speed.

There aren't many scenes that don't involve moving cars, but they're just as well staged: there's a protracted scene in a diner in which almost nothing happens for minutes at a time, as David tries to decide if any of the boot-wearing strangers are his pursuer, and it's amazingly tense, largely as a result of its whiplash contrast between wide and close-up shots (there's a particularly great shot of Weaver standing at the far end of a deep composition over a pool table, visually emphasising his isolation and distrust of the people around him in a most brutalising way). And even in the still moments, cars and the road haunt the frame: Spielberg uses the old trick of showing the beat-up rusty heap of the truck flittering around the sides of the image and in the back of shots through windows and the like, pure horror movie stuff that gives Duel more constant tension than even Jaws would ever come close to.

It is, to be clear, all deeply lowbrow stuff: one of the most strictly genre-bound films in Spielberg's entire career. But it's lowbrow stuff made with the utmost sophistication of craft. It's lovely that Duel put the director in a place to start the rest of his career, but frankly, in the four decades and change that have followed, he's only improved on it a handful of times.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1998: In which Hollywood's king of populist entertainment critques wartime jingoism while also pandering to it

Knowing that I'd eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan - to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same - has been one of the things that I've been most excited about since the very beginning of this blog's Hollywood Century project. So here we are, and here we grapple, and I have 16 years of accumulated thoughts, praise, complaints, and misgivings to get through in the next couple thousand words. Apologies in advance if it gets a little messy.

The confusion I have long felt about the film is not least because there are two films we talk about when we talk about Saving Private Ryan: one is 21 minutes long, and it maybe the best-crafted & most powerful combat film ever produced. The other is much, much longer, and it is a largely trite, generic, and in some important ways philosophically dubious story of a squad in WWII trudging through France in June, 1944, while complaining in ways that perfectly map onto the pre-established clichés for each of the eight men in that squad. Actually, there's a third movie, too: it's the opening and closing bookends set in, presumably, 1998 itself, the year of the film's release, and it is among the clumsiest, most disastrously-conceived material in the entirety of Steven Spielberg's directorial corpus.

But let's stick with the actual meat of the movie first. As virtually everybody knows, I imagine, Saving Private Ryan opens (after that 1998 scene) at the onset of the D-Day invasion of the beaches of Normandy, follows along with one tiny cluster of American soldiers for quite a while, and then continues on as those soldiers are assigned a most peculiar mission three days after the Allied forces successfully land. To wit: they are to trek deep into the French countryside, where they must find one PFC James Ryan, whose three brothers have all died recently, and whom the Army brass has decided shall be saved from the hell of war, so that his mother doesn't have to suffer the agony of losing all her children in quick succession.

Admitting out front that the movie has other priorities on its mind, the first problem we run into is structural. The movie begins three times, and each new beginning seems to have virtually nothing to do with what we've already seen. The transition out of the opening scene makes absolutely no sense once you know where the film is going, implying that the old man (Harrison Young) we're watching in the American war cemetery at Normandy is recalling his experience on that beach, staring a thousand-yard stare as the soundtrack begins to filter in the pre-invasion sounds of waves, boats, and men shuffling. I think there's really no conceivable way to read the editing and sound, even the way the man's face is held in close-up, without making that assumption; but we'll find out at the end that he was miles and miles inland during the invasion. Strike one.

Then comes the invasion itself, a three-act mini-movie unto itself, that has no connection to the ultimate attempt to find Private Ryan. We're introduced to most of our main characters, but we don't know that we're being introduced to them: the sequence ties itself to Captain Jim Miller, who we know is important because he's played by Tom Hanks, but we don't know who he is by name yet, and we don't have any notion of who the people are around him. This isn't an introduction, but a totally unrelated narrative chunk that happens to concern the same characters. It's the backstory to the actual plot of Saving Private Ryan only to the same degree that watching Don Corleone having eggs and coffee while reading the morning paper would have been a useful opening scene to The Godfather.

Now, we are not dumb, and so we know that Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat had other things on their mind in including the D-Day invasion than telling a clear, cohesive story. Saving Private Ryan is, explicitly, a film paying tribute to the men who fought and died in World War II, and that is far more important to it than telling a story or fleshing out characters. And in that regard, the Omaha Beach scene is far more important and comprehensible, since its function is to show the chaos and agony of war, so that we'll have a better sense for the rest of the movie of what kind of terrible suffering these men go through. Its value, that is to say, is entirely thematic - and I'll return to that, but now let's turn to the battle scene itself.

It is a work of genius, of course. I can't imagine how anyone but the most morbid Spielberg hater could deny that. What is remarkable to me above all things is how the invasion sequence in this film is absolutely and in every way the work of a populist filmmaker: the craftsmanship and ability to lead the audience to an emotional place he has preselected (the commonest knock against Spielberg, but also to my mind the least-convincing: all movies are emotionally manipulative, he's just unusually direct in showing he he does it) that he'd honed over years of making some of the biggest crowd-pleasers in cinema history turns out to work just as well, and in exactly the same ways, when he's trying to flatten us into terrified submission. Saving Private Ryan's combat scenes are fucking brilliant filmmaking, innovative and groundbreaking in ways that so quickly became standard procedure for war movies, and especially WWII movies, that it's difficult to quite see what makes it special. But oh, how special it is: just the way that Janusz Kamiński shot it (to my mind, this is the film that cemented him as an essential part of the Spielberg team) would be worth a paper all by itself. The short version is that he relies on excessive grain and desaturation to create a bleak, almost nauseating feeling, which is then built on by his celebrated use of a decreased shutter angle, giving the images a sharp, metallic precision and render the movements with staccato bursts that keep feeling like they're going to launch into fast-motion. And on top of that, we also find extensive use of erratic hand-held camera work, Spielberg's open attempt to copy documentary style, which extends to allowing dirt and stage blood to slop all over the lens.

All that hyper-realistic cinematography creates an immersive reality more than virtually any other combat scene I can name, and that's even without mentioning the film's amazing sound mix - an astonishingly powerful experience in theaters, one that I remember 16 years later more clearly than things I saw last week. Every single bullet feels like it was placed specifically to suggest physical space and the sheer scale of the D-Day invasion, echoing on all sides, now horribly close and now terribly far. For that is the other thing that sets this scene above so many other great combat sequences: the feeling of littleness it creates. We follow a tiny number of people through a confusingly-defined space, and we never get a sense of what's going on all throughout the rest of the beach except in the flashes that Miller is able to spot out of the corner of his eye. But that roaring sound mix tells all: it describes with all its layers a battleground stretching out into infinity, bodies dying invisibly - and sometimes quite visibly, right before our eyes, in blunt scenes of carnage - in which the one man we're following barely registers as an individual.

There are no moments of Spielbergian sentiment, and yet the whole thing is finely tuned and orchestrated using his very particular skills: an awareness of how to use brief, iconic gestures to thrust us into a state of high emotion. Panic, in this case, something not found in such protracted form anywhere else in the director's career. The exact things that make this work are what make it the work of a mainstream entertainer: things are communicated simply, directly, and without a trace of subtlety, and our gaze is directed exactly where the filmmakers want it to be directed, so that we can be walloped by whatever they're going to show us next.

It's tremendously powerful and crushing, and then it ends, and Saving Private Ryan actually, finally starts. You can tell exactly where it happens, because the John Williams score that has been silent for 21 minutes asserts itself, and in the blink of an eye this harsh, sober experience turns gloppy and dumb. For this particular Williams score is offensively sentimental and pushy and omnipresent beyond even the caricature of his work; I wouldn't hesitate a moment to call it the worst score he composed for any Spielberg film. At any rate, it's the only one of his scores for the director that actively makes the film worse, cutting into Kamiński's sober, bleached-out images and the uncharacteristic hardness of Spielberg's camera and direction to his actors with weepy, patriotic horns and militaristic elegy.

That being said, the A-plot of Saving Private Ryan is so beset by trouble spots that singling out the music is a bit unfair. To begin with, Miller's squad reveals itself to be populated exclusively by clichés who are precisely described the first time we see them, and never break out of our immediate preconception as to what they're going to do. Besides our taciturn captain, we have the Hothead (Edward Burns), the Tough GI (Tom Sizemore) the Bible-Thumping Southerner (Barry Pepper), the Sarcastic Jew (Adam Goldberg), the Pleasant Medic (Giovanni Ribisi), the Warmhearted Rough Italian (Vin Diesel), and most importantly of all, the Untrained Newbie and Audience/Director Surrogate (Jeremy Davies), the one with a sturdy moral sense but also no survival instinct at all. I suspect, if pressed, Spielberg and Rodat would defend their pack of unimaginative stereotypes as a tribute to the WWII films of yore, all the way back to the '40s when those stereotypes started to congeal. Except that Saving Private Ryan absolutely, transparently wants to be more complex than that: to present battle as a horrible experience, not an ennobling one, and to present the trauma of warfare as serving more to flatten soldiers' humanity rather than to make them Manly American Men. Relying on musty old stock characters gets in the way of that.

And anyway, the direction of the plot over the next two hours is so all-over-the-map that no consistent theme emerges anyway; the only clear message that has emerged by the end is the conviction that, well, Our Boys sure did see some terrible things over there. Critically, the film never quite makes up its mind whether all the killing and seeing the enemy as a faceless Other is ultimately soul-damaging or not; the arc of Davies's character famously muddies all of this, since it's structured largely to show how he comes to realise that killing prisoners is okay - and yet, the way that Spielberg and Kamiński film his ultimate act of killing, with the camera trained on Davies's face and never showing the German body fall, doesn't permit the viewer a sense of celebration and suggests that we're watching him fall into the dark side. But that kind of moral ambiguity fits not at all with the many other scenes.

Running down everything that works beautifully (a scene where a little girl assaults her dad for putting her in harm's way in the act of trying to save her; Hanks's cold-blooded recitation of the big Norman Rockwell speech about his homelife) and everything that doesn't (the bafflingly over-written scene with General Marshall, played by Harve Presnell, concocting the plot to save Private Ryan; pretty much every single beat focused on Pepper's sniper, who prays for guidance from God before killing his enemies, a potentially rich irony that Spielberg is palpably frightened to grapple with) would take too long, so suffice it to say that the film suffers from aimlessness and bloat, perked up frequently by individually piercing moments of character truth. And the film always, always looks perfect, capturing both painterly beauty and a sense of devastated coldness simultaneously. To be honest, winning the Best Director Oscar but losing Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love seems almost exactly right to me: Saving Private Ryan succeeds at the creation of stable tone and texture, but is messy and wandering as a drama (of course, exactly exactly right would have been The Thin Red Line making a clean sweep of everything but Kamiński's win, but it does nobody any good to pretend that was ever an option).

The film does eventually find focus and purpose again - and drops the damn Williams music - in another long combat scene, this time after the squad has found Private Ryan (Matt Damon - and Jesus, but the number of future famous people in this movie is impressive; Bryan Cranston and Nathan Fillion also pop up). It's a terrific piece of filmmaking, if not quite as radical in its technique. But unlike Omaha Beach, this climax isn't quite so much about the punishing brutality of war; it's more of a conventional action movie, rousing and saddening in equal measure. François Truffaut legendarily observed that no war film can truly argue against war, since they always make combat look exciting; this is not true at all of the grotesque opening sequence, but it is at least partially true of the finale. And that's without dragging in the cloying final scene, which looks at all the ambiguity threaded throughout even the weaker moments of the main feature, and says "well, fuck that", with a stirring coda in which it is clarified that to die in combat serving one's country is a Glorious Sacrifice, and those who fought but did not die are always going to be haunted by the conviction that they're not as morally good as the fallen. It's jingoistic pap, made worse by the film's only truly uninteresting cinematography, and Williams slobbering aural war memorial.

Saving Private Ryan achieved something that, even after a decade and a half, I still can't quite believe: this very long, depressing, unsparingly violent movie was the highest-grossing film of 1998 (domestically - worldwide, it was easily bested by Michael Bay's shrill Armageddon, which makes much more sense even though it's much sadder). It was, in fact, the last Steven Spielberg film to top the year's box office, and the last R-rated film as well. Much as he had done when getting in right at the first stages of a major new revival in dinosaur fandom with Jurassic Park, the director somehow managed to predict the Zeitgeist in some unfathomable way: 1998 also saw the release of Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, and between the two projects, they triggered a wave of nostalgia for and interest in the culture surrounding World War II that I honestly have never figured out.

Whatever the case, something about this unremittingly bleak film, whose sops towards uplift and finding something purposeful in war feel messily splashed onto its overriding sense of desolation, struck an enormous chord with audiences. I can't argue that's not deserved, even though it's weird: Spielberg-the-sentimentalist transforming into Spielberg-the-unsmiling-chronicler leaves us with quite a sturdy array of well-built, emotionally transfixing moments. Much of it is foggy, and a small amount of it is actively objectionable, but so much of Saving Private Ryan works so well, and so undeniably, that even if I think it can only be regarded as one of Spielberg's most difficult "problem" films, it's absolutely the work of a supremely talented film director with an irreproachable, top-notch crew.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1998
-Terry Gilliam's final film that gets made without the world burning down around it, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is released
-Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol predict, then indict reality TV with The Truman Show
-Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner just wave their dicks right out there for everyone to see, pitting DreamWorks Animation's Antz and Pixar's A Bug's Life against each other

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1998
-Still the best movie ever built on video game narrative logic, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run bows in Germany
-Nakata Hideo's Ringu inaugurates the modern era of J-horror
-Show Me Love - known more bluntly as Fucking Åmål in its native Sweden - introduces the world to the social realism of Lukas Moodysson

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1982: In which horror went mainstream when we weren't looking, and the New Age of the Producer has begun

The question of authorship of 1982's Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe Hooper received credit, or if he was simply a very, very, very hands-on producer. It is a situation that undoubtedly happens more often than anybody supposes, and the history of the studio system is thick with movie for which the producer had more of a firm hand on the final product than the director, or directors (for it is also the case that many more old films than you could imagine went through multiple directors, with only the last one, or the one who did the most work, getting the onscreen credit; the studios were factories then, not art classes). But in this case, fanboyism kicks in: an anxiety over whether the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the director, also in 1982, of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial "really" made Poltergeist, and how we're supposed to value it as a result. Which is nonsense, of course; whether Hooper was just there to facilitate Spielberg's vision, or if he was just there to serve as a blind for the DGA while Spielberg facilitated his own vision (and what is not contested is that Hooper had little to nothing to do with post-production, where the bulk of any film's actual personality emerges anyway), there was never any point whn Hooper might possible have ended up as the auteur of what is, every inch, a Spielberg film. And this is not the first time that a producer, and not the director, served as the primary creative spirit behind a movie: one needn't look beyond David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun for two especially clear-cut examples. The desire to discover who "really" directed Poltergeist is a farrago, mired in 1970s-style belief in Director as God and the way that singular artistic visions can be communicated though an especially collaborative art form. But we are in the 1980s now; the director's artistic vision is dead, and it is now time for branding and marketing and a new iteration of the old studio machine to make movies for us, and not individual genius so much.

Anyway, the point of any film is the film, and whoever really directed Poltergeist, the film does not cease to be the thing it has always been and will always be: a fascinating and in some ways disastrously compromised dark twin to E.T. that also represents a weirdly family-friendly horror movie from an era when "horror movies" almost exclusively meant stories of grotesque psychos stabbing sexually active teenagers with lots of stage blood ensuing. It's one of those haunted house movies about the unpredictable terrors of home ownership, looking at the literal suburban hell faced by the Freeling family: dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson), who got the gorgeous new tract home they all live in as a perk for being the most awesome of all the sales reps for the Cuesta Verde subdivision; mom Diane (JoBeth Williams), teen daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), young son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest of all, little Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), who's the first member of the family to actively notice the odd shifts and bumps that everybody else overlooks. She also develops, early in the movie, a peculiar fascination with the static that the family television receives when programming ends for the evening (ah, the days when TV wasn't broadcasting every hour of every day!). In fact, by the end of the first scene, she'll end up staring intently at the blasting white noise with an implacable look of calm on her face that contrasts mightily with the raging flickers of white light that make her close-up look unnaturally freakish for such a small child.

Something or someone is communicating to Carol Anne through that static, and it starts to mess with the Freeling household at large, creating a weird zone in the kitchen where objects and people slide across the floor, while also battering things about and shaking the house to no end. Inexplicably, the family doesn't take this as their cue to leave immediately; it's not until one particularly violent event during a terrible storm results in Carol Anne having been spirited right out of the house that Steve and Diane begin to suspect that something terrible might be going on; this sends them to call on local parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) to help figure out what the hell is happening, and when she proves no better equipped to to explain the paranormal activity, she brings in the psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), whose beatific attitude in describing the unholy nexus of dark psychic energy residing in the Freeling home is the freakiest part of the whole movie.

Poltergeist is a garden variety haunted house movie in a lot of ways; it benefits most from coming at a time when, after years and years of treating horror as a shoddy B-commodity to be hidden with shame, the studios were starting to realise, en masse, that there was some money to be made in the genre. And it especially benefits from being a pet project of Spielberg's right in the window of time when he could basically do no wrong: he had, between 1975 and 1981, directed three of the most indescribably enormous hits in the history of American cinema (and also the mega-flop 1941, from which he sprung back quickly), and if he wanted to oversee the first special effects horror extravaganza of the new popcorn movie era, nobody was likely to step in and tell him no. And so Poltergeist is executed with a tremendous array of cinematic tricks that were the absolute state of the art in 1982, most of which have aged fairly well. Though a lot of it feels sort of identical to his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and therein lies the problem.

Poltergeist is a Steven Spielberg movie. I've said it, but it needs to be repeated: whether Tobe Hooper "directed" it or not, he was only executing Spielberg's very specific and very characteristic vision. That the film came from the exact same period in Spielberg's adulthood reminiscing about Spielberg's childhood as E.T. is absolutely impossible to miss, as both present a version of the California suburbs as a nexus for childhood fantasies - happy fantasies of finding a best friend and having adventures in E.T., scary fantasies of looming spooky trees and creepy clown dolls and the ineffable terror of thunderstorms in Poltergeist. But Steven Spielberg, for all the thrillers dotting his career, has an attitude that is completely at odds with the impulses of horror, and however much influence Hooper had on the pre-production and production (and nobody denies that he was active in the film's pre-production), the fingerprints of a man who certainly isn't known for his family-friendly work are clearly to be felt in patches here and there. So we have, on the one hand, a writer and producer whose instincts are unyieldingly safe and juvenile in focus: let's make Poltergeist a spooky story about the things that scare little kids, but not too spooky. And on the other, we have a collaborator who made America's most widely-seen film about cannibalism prior to The Silence of the Lambs. Given how much of the film ends up walking back all of the actual scary material with lengthy conversations about metaphysics and light shows in which ghosts look like even more gentle Spielbergian aliens, it's remarkable that Hooper, or whoever, was able to get as much of the legitimate nightmare fuel smuggled into the film as he was: it's never sustained for more than a scene, and it's usually only a single isolated effect at a time, but there's a reason Poltergeist started the conversation that ultimately led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Rotting flesh hallucinations and giant hell-skulls and some acutely terrifying sound effects come along just often enough to pierce through the "let's tell a scary bedtime story!" attitude that is Poltergeist's main mode for it to feel legitimately darker and harsher than a first approximation of the story and the way the story has been told would ever lead one to believe.

At the same time, it leaves the film feeling erratic and lumpy: not like the largely gentle-touch of the horror was a deliberate choice to let those occasional high-impact moments land harder, but like the film was being torn in two directions. And again, we don't know that happened; but the story about how Jerry Goldsmith (hired to give a disappointingly generic John Williams impression) was shocked to find that he'd be working with the producer, not the director seems awfully telling in at least one respect. For the score, more than anything else, is the film's keenest tool in knocking the edge off its horror with a sweetness and even Romantic air that significantly undercuts the moody lighting and looming camera angles (particularly in the very last shot, which seems for all the world like it should be brooding, except that the music insists, in a most bullying way, "all is well, the heroes have won, la-la").

The production values alone are enough to make this one of the 1980s' most distinctive and important horror movies, showcasing what the genre could do when given unprecedented resources and support; its thematic concerns - living in the suburbs is actually bad for your soul! - make it essential viewing for any even semi-serious Spielberg aficionado, of whom I understand that there are at least one or two out in the world. Its interpolation of enormously ambitious shot set-ups and effects sequences into the modest domestic setting of a single family home set it out as one of the most unique of the first generation of post-Star Wars effects showcases. And yet for all that I'd basically recommend it as necessary viewing for everybody, I can't convince myself that Poltergeist actually works all that well. Truly, it achieves the exact goal it sets for itself, to provide the most intense scary movie experience that the whole family can enjoy. But speaking as a grown-up horror fan, I can't help but wish for more out of this one-of-a-kind marriage of Spielbergian extravagance with genre mechanics, and while Poltergeist does not fail on its own terms, it still feels very much like a missed opportunity.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1982
-Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger learns what is best in life in Conan the Barbarian, and becomes the most unexpected superstar in generations
-The lingering memory of the Holocaust poisons the present, as Meryl Streep is forced to make Sophie's Choice
-Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the film that launched a thousand puberties, and proved the teen sex comedy could be pretty darn good cinema, too

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1982
-The Palme d'Or victory for Yol brings Turkish cinema to new international prominence
-In the last year of his life, ultra-prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder releases his final masterwork, Veronika Voss
-Contemporary history is solemnly embalmed by the British-Indian co-production Gandhi

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THE LIST IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD

30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. The divide between these phases of his career is simply identified, for it was on 30 November that his 196-minute Holocaust drama Schindler's List premiered in Washington, D.C.

There's not another film in Spielberg's CV that comes with so much baggage hanging on it: the widespread certainty that it's his best film (an opinion I don't share) on the one side, the way that it has been used as the thickest club with which to beat up the director for his perceived faults as a sentimentalist on the other. There was Stanley Kubrick's famous judgment that "The Holocaust was about 6 million Jews who were killed. Schindler's List is about 600 Jews who weren't killed" (and bless his heart, Stanley was off by almost half - the number was upwards of 1100), and Shoah director Claude Lanzmann was downright apoplectic that something so trivial and saccharine could be summoned into the world eight years after his own self-appointed definitive masterpiece came out. 20 years later, it's still the easiest thing to find people who respond with feverish hostility to Spielberg's attempt to do something accessible and populist about the greatest moral crime of the modern age.

On the flipside, the film has also never shaken its media imposed narrative that it was the absolutely be-all and end-all of movies about the Holocaust, a perception that the director at no point attempted to dispute, and which he very well might have agreed with. Spielberg, of course, might be the worst major filmmaker in the world at understanding what makes his own movies work, and I must strenuously disagree with the idea that Schindler's List is the greatest film about the Holocaust (Shoah is certainly better, and so is Night and Fog), or even the greatest non-documentary (right off the top of my head, The Pianist is clearly more serious about its topic). It is a great film, one of the greatest of the 1990s, even, but not just because it is about the Holocaust, and it does nobody any good to pretend that it is somehow a world-changing exercise in that regard.

So let's play a game. Let's not start by wallowing in two decades of conventional wisdom, of fame and infamy, starting with what we already know Schindler's List to be, and look for proof that we're right; let's start with the movie itself, and try to figure out what it is from there. Because I must say, the first thing that the movie itself suggests to me is neither a pandering wallow in tacky sentiment slathered all over the gravest event known to history, nor the profoundest filmed exploration of the Holocaust yet made: it is a morality play about a craven bureaucrat finding his soul. Bureaucracy, at any rate, is the first thing that Schindler's List presents, long before it gets to to the Holocaust, or even its first named Jewish character: after a brief prologue that simply establishes a tone of reflection and Judaic ritual, the first thing that happens in the legitimate plot is watching the isolated moments of a man whose face we do not see assembling himself for a party, putting on his fine clothes, his costly accessories, and lastly, the punchline of a Nazi Party pin. Taken as a whole, this opening scene very efficiently and cleanly presents to us a man putting on Nazism with the same blitheness as his fancy cufflinks, and for much the same purpose: to impress people. And that is very much who this man, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), reveals himself to be: a glad-handling entrepreneur who sees the onset of World War II as an irreplaceable business opportunity, and the military officers of the Nazi Party nothing but the objects of his schmoozing, nothing but the cogs he must grease to ensure that his own money-making endeavors will be as untroubled as possible.

The film tracks this charming but merciless war profiteer as he determines how to use the worn-down, ghettoised Jews of Kraków, Poland as a cheap and anxious-to-impress labor force, allowing himself to be slowly, almost accidentally goaded into regarding them with fondness and a protective eye by his Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), until he finally reaches the point that he would rather drive his career and fortune into the dust in order to save as many of them as he can, making up a list of all the Jewish workers he can afford to "buy" from the particularly psychopathic SS Untersturmführer, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), in charge of the concentration camp from which Schindler's workforce had been culled.

Schindler, with his factory just outside Kraków, had a good opportunity to witness much of the persecution of Poland's Jews firsthand, and Schindler's List, over the course of its long running time, alternates between depicting his gradual transition from amoral man to savior, and showcasing several aspects of the Holocaust from the degradation of the Jews in the ghetto (including humiliation and summary execution), to the debased life in a camp, to the horror of the Final Solution, though since this is a story about 1100 Jews who didn't die in the Holocaust, the full depths of evil practice in Auschwitz and elsewhere are left mostly unexplored. As it is, Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (this is, by a ridiculously lopsided margin, the best screenplay of his career), already get themselves into trouble by trying to include too much "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" material in their film: the one completely spurious and ineffective scene in the film follows a group of women mistakenly routed through Auschwitz, sent to the showers, and washed off. It's one thing that this is unnecessary baggage in an already long movie; the real problem here is that, to dramatise a scene in the death chambers in his movie that's very specifically about people not dying, Spielberg is obliged to stage this non-fatal event in the language of a horror-thriller, and while from a purely mechanical standpoint, it's absolutely great filmmaking (the women's arrival in Auschwitz at night, with white "snow" - revealed at the end to be human ashes - falling against a deep black backdrop - is the most recnognisably Spielbergian moment in the entire feature), there's something immeasurably distasteful about something as real, and incomprehensibly inhumane, as the gas chambers at Auschwitz used as the "gotcha!" moment in a thriller sequence. There might be a film that uses horror imagery to depict the death camps and have it not come off as crass exploitation, but Schindler's List isn't built to be that film, and Spielberg wouldn't be the man to direct it, anyway.

One scene in 196 minutes is a pretty great track record, though (and I'm also counting the problematic epilogue as successful, I guess, as I don't really know what else to do with it). For the most part, the transition between "Schindler's character arc" scenes, and "the complete history of the Holocaust" scenes is done cleanly and effectively, and given the shape of his arc, Schindler makes a tremendously effective witness to the events of those years in that place. Allowing the criticism that The Story Of The Holocaust shouldn't be told from the perspective of a Germany, I'd counter that Schindler's List isn't The Story Of The Holocaust in any real way, and thank God for that - it's much better as something more like a fable of human behavior in the face of utter depravity and cruelty, one that is able to explore the Holocaust in a way that had never been done in mainstream pop culture before 1993. So it's the best of both worlds: a fascinating and deeply engaging human story married to a Very Important Lesson that, for once, actually manages to be largely instructive (and this, I think, is what someone like Lanzmann misses: that in order to make this story, Spielberg needed it to have a dramatic spine; Schindler's story is a hell of a good one; mass audiences wouldn't want to go to a unrelievedly death-focused Holocaust movie, but would go to an almost unendingly grim one if it had an uplifting ending; and nobody but film nerds will ever be persuaded to watch a 9-hour documentary, something I know from having attempted and failed to persuade many, many people to have a Shoah marathon with me).

Spielberg is never not a populist, and this ends up being a huge part of the reason that Schindler's List works: he's able to effectively condense things into easily-absorbed emotional beats that build up over the long term to have a profound cumulative effect. For something so damn long - it is, not by a small figure, the director's longest movie - it's epically efficient filmmaking, using emphatic, almost ironic editing (courtesy of Spielberg's ever-reliable collaborator Michael Kahn) to hammer meaning home in swift, sharp blows. It is not, to be certain, a subtle movie: there's almost a certain fatalism to the way that juxtapositions carry home meaning like hammer blows. But the Holocaust was not subtle, and refusing to treat it cinematically like it was is certainly a defensible aesthetic choice. See also the black-and-white cinematography, gorgeously severe and shot by Janusz Kaminski in the first of the many truly essential collaborations between him and Spielberg: the director's state decision for the choice was that, to him, the Holocaust was a deadening event that stripped all the life and "color" from the world, but it could just as easily be noted that the film is a series of visual extremes, contrasty with very little greyscale, and that it is literally in black and white and very little else. It's visually expressing a Manichean idea of morality - here is Good, and here is Evil. There is no mistaking one for the other. And since very little in human history better justifies a Manichean approach than the Holocaust, this works, almost unbearably well.

(At this point, an aside: the Little Girl in the Red Coat (Oliwia Dabrowska). One of the most contentious elements in the film, and one that, regrettably, I have no settled opinion towards. I'll say this much, if there wasn't just that one shot of her inside a building, still in red, I'd feel a whole lot better about her presence, since in every other shot we see her in color, it's from Schindler's POV, and in this regard she is a great element. Her first appearance is the moment where he's struck by the inhumanity, and not just the meanness, of the German's approach towards Jews; her second, as a corpse, is where he is so outraged that he commits himself fully to a path of righteousness. It would be better for the film if she were never otherwise seen, perhaps.)

Does Spielberg manipulate us? Of course he does, it's what he's best at. It is manipulation in the service of great moral truths, though, and I like that Schindler's List doesn't dance around its themes, but blasts them home with intense righteous passion. It's not even that it lacks subtlety as a character drama, for the way it sketches Schindler's growing awareness of his conscience is a tribute to both the director's and the actor's skill (it's Neeson's career-best performance, easily). I am particularly fond of the emphasis placed on the two times that Schindler is called "good", by a Jew: once at 40 minutes into the film, in thanks from a worker, once at 93 minutes, from a woman looking for help. In both cases, Neeson both delicately and broadly demonstrates Schindler's embarrassment and anger at hearing that word: the discomfort of a man who knows he isn't good, and that knowledge is the first step on the path that leads to his climactic, and often-parodied breakdown at the end. There's no moment in the whole film I feel more compelled to defend: it is syrupy and over-the-top, but it is that way only because it is completely unprotected and sincere: a film about a single man abandoning his careerist cynicism is itself the most sentimental and uncynical scene in the movie. It's easy to mock, because all mockery is itself cynical, and broad-strokes, I-will-make-you-cry filmmaking is the diametric opposite to such cynicism. It is the release valve being turned all the way open after hours of misery, and no matter how vividly aware I am that Spielberg, and the shameless, shameless John Williams score are demanding that I feel exactly what they mean me to feel, I also appreciate being given a piece of catharsis. No, the Holocaust was not cathartic, but as established, Schindler's List is not the Holocaust.

Less subtle and more in the realm of moral fable is the sparring between Schindler and Goeth, played by Fiennes in a devastating performance that, love Tommy Lee Jones as much as I do, is probably the single most ridiculous loss of an acting Oscar in the last quarter-century. It's a portrayal of evil that is at one unmodulated (there's nothing decent in the character's entire onscreen appearance), and thoroughly human - Goeth has feelings and sensibility, he recognises suffering, he doubts. His first line includes what I believe to be the first use of the word "fuck" in Spielberg's filmography. There's a scene where the editing nervily implies that the two men are each other's reflection (they're both shaving, and Kahn deliberately confuses eyelines in cutting between them), and this plays out in small ways throughout the film, as Schindler becomes aware of essential morality and thus leaves behind the pragmatic ideology he adopted, while Goeth uses a fierce commitment to ideology to deflect and flickers of morality he feels. A sufficiently eager symbolic reading could even position him as the devil tempting Schindler while Kingsley's Stern (a third truly great performance, but unlike the other two, not a career-best one) is the angel saving him, but I can't quite go there.

Still, I think that's the right register in which to appreciate the film best: with nuance, without subtlety, as a rich depiction of one man's struggle to moral awareness presented in bold, essentialist tones. Schindler's List is a furious movie, in which sharply-defined images batter us constantly, weeping violins lacerate us, and human behavior is presented in emphatic scenes that are so distinct in themselves (the narrative flow of the film is actually quite jumpy, when you stop and think about chronology and the links between consecutive moments) that it almost feels like a pageant. There's nothing about this that's meant to be clever, and like most of Spielberg's work, it is more anxious to engage with the viewer's emotions than thoughts. It does this with an impact rare even among his films, and clarity of purpose, and visual precision, all of which are enough to make it one of the essential films of its decade. Not so important socially as it thinks it is, perhaps, but even more important aesthetically and thematically, and no less necessary now than 20 years ago, 20 years before that, or 20 years in the future.

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BEST SHOT: THE COLOR PURPLE

With Lee Daniels' The Butler right in the wings, with its prominent role for sometime actress & cultural icon Oprah Winfrey, Nathaniel R has sent us to the far side of her small film career for this week's Hit Me with Your Best Shot: Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple from 1985, in which Winfrey made her film debut and snagged an Oscar nomination (two things which Whoopi Goldberg also did with this picture, incidentally).

The film marks the first time that Spielberg attempted to make a serious movie for grown-ups, as odd as it is to think, 28 years later, that the future director of Saving Private Ryan, Munich, and Lincoln had to prove to a doubting industry that he was capable of directing anything but popcorn entertainment. That being said, I've never warmed up to this one, which seems to dubiously prove, if anything that Spielberg couldn't make adult-themed dramas, not right out of the box, anyway. He frankly wasn't a very good fit for the material: not simply because he wasn't black, as was the big complaint at the time and remains a complaint you'll hear occasionally (honestly, being white probably wasn't as big a liability for this project as being a man was), but because he was too sentimental. Eight years later, Schindler's List found the director finally ready to (mostly) choke down his instinct for romanticism, and the director's very next film after The Color Purple, 1987's Empire of the Sun, manages the fine balance of indulging in glossy Spielbergisms in a way that supports, rather than undercuts, the underlying gravity of the material.

Bluntly: The Color Purple is too pretty and lush for its own good. This is a story about near-constant suffering of an African-American woman trapped in a rapacious culture and surrounded by abusive men, and Spielberg and cinematographer Allen Daviau (the fifth of their six collaborations) fall into the trap of constantly wrapping this material in dappled, picturesque shots: a conversation about systematic rape takes place amidst warmly backlit sheets gently floating in the wind; a proud woman's humiliation at the hands of a daffy white woman is set against the backdrop of a small American town pulled right out of Norman Rockwell. Which makes it a particularly thorny candidate for an exercise like this, where the goal is to pick a shot that is both attractive (and that's damn near everything here: Daviau's work was never more painterly) and an appropriate visual expression of the emotions and themes of the piece.

That being said, the same instinct for visual communication that served and continues to serve Spielberg so uncommonly well couldn't just be turned off like a switch, and even if The Color Purple suffers from more inappropriate visual sentiment than perhaps anything else he ever directed, there are still plenty of moments throughout where his ability to short-circuit words and put emotions right into the viewer's head through the sheer potency of his shots is used to excellent effect. Even some of the more cloying bits of the movie end up working almost despite themselves, creating a sense of bittersweet of beauty that isn't quite what the script appears to be saying (and it's even less so what Alice Walker was saying in the source novel), but it is still moving and transporting in its own right, particularly in the shamelessly tearjerking final 20 minutes. I'm enough of an apologist that even problematic Spielberg (which this patently is, as much as anything this side of Amistad - ain't that a coincidence) still strikes me as being of merit.

Anyway, let's move on and pick a best shot. I was so ready to run with this one that I even started to write it up, but I got cold feet:

It's just so... self-consciously composed, right? In useful, telling ways, and there are nice echoes with images from other Spielberg films, but ultimately I'll leave it as runner-up; I elected to go with something a bit subtler, and character-driven. Namely, this:

The point we've hit in the plot is that Celie (Goldberg) has, for the first time in a joyless life, found a true friend and soulmate (and lover, if you read between the lines and don't have the film's squeamishness about lesbianism) in the form of Shug Avery (Margaret Avery, the third of the movie's three acting Oscar nominees). She's even done a bit of partying and having fun, unprecedented events in her experience, and here we find her wearing one of Shug's busiest dresses, a sharp contrast to the dowdy rags her abusive husband Mister (Danny Glover) keeps her in.

This one is all about performance, and color - that eye-blasting red, matched slightly by Shug's reflection in a much more muted robe in the same approximate family, is a bolt of brightness that the gray and brown dominated interiors of the movie to this point have longed for, giving some warmth and life to a character who needs it badly. But even more than that, even more than the wonderful gesticulations Avery is giving in the corner of the frame (which you can't see in a still, but it's pretty great), what I love has nothing to do with composition or mise en scène, and all to do with Goldberg's wonderful physical performance. At this point in the movie, Celie is still largely unspeaking, cowed by everything around her into submission, and Goldberg has an impressive array of expressions and gestures throughout the movie. But all of them topple before the excellence of her bearing and her feelings in this moment: obvious discomfort (those girder-rigid arms!) at being in something so gaudy and revealing, certainly for the first time, but look at that thin-lipped smile of total smug contentment: this woman is proud to be doing something so goofy and embarrassing and naughty, and the way Goldberg plays this one shot is the perfect introduction the story's central idyll, as her newly-awakened feelings of freedom and self-expression give way to the first honest, rewarding human connection she has ever experienced.

There's not much active joy in this movie, but this shot surely is joyful; and since the overall arc of the film is toward empowerment and happiness, I think that one of the few moments early on which foreshadow that development was an appropriate way to go. A bit light on directorial pyrotechnics; but then, pyrotechnics are exactly the problem here, and it felt right to someplace totally different.

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